Sunday, January 11, 2009

Apart from the douchebag wanna-be tough guys - like Alan Dershowitz - who get erections from watching Jack Bauer torture bad guys on 24, and soil themselves from reading true accounts of Americans torturing detainees, most of us with the capacity for thinking with our brains and not our testicles know that torture is more likely to produce false information more akin to what the interrogators want to hear, rather than anything resembling the truth.

This article from the December issue of Vanity Fair makes it pretty clear.

But setting aside just for the moment that it doesn't work, the real problem with torture is simple: It is sick, and it is wrong. Torture is the manifestation of everything that is bad about humans. It is sad to see what little it takes to get humans to regress to their most base and vile state, shrug off any morals they may have once had, all because of fear.

Apart from the douchebag wanna-be tough guys - like Alan Dershowitz - who get erections from watching Jack Bauer torture bad guys on 24, and soil themselves from reading true accounts of Americans torturing detainees, most of us with the capacity for thinking with our brains and not our testicles know that torture is more likely to produce false information more akin to what the interrogators want to hear, rather than anything resembling the truth.

This article from the December issue of Vanity Fair makes it pretty clear.

But setting aside just for the moment that it doesn't work, the real problem with torture is simple: It is sick, and it is wrong. Torture is the manifestation of everything that is bad about humans. It is sad to see what little it takes to get humans to regress to their most base and vile state, shrug off any morals they may have once had, all because of fear.